The Birth of Love Read Online Free Page A

blood. I am wholly encased in blood. Yet I am not drowning. I can breathe in the blood. Blood is my natural métier, in my dream. I imbibe the blood and am nourished by blood. I am very peaceful and happy. Perhaps I am smiling as I drink down blood. When I wake from these dreams I am sweating and crying. I wake in my cell to the sounds of others screaming and though I try to summon the memory of this blood – to understand its import and also because something deep within me craves it – I cannot.’
    ‘You say that you are glad of the blood. What do you think this means?’
    ‘I am not sure.’
    ‘What other dreams do you have? Are there any others of significance?’
    ‘There is one, in which I am searching for something in the blood. In this dream I am not in the blood, I am outside it. But I am reaching my hands into it. When I take out my hands they are coated in blood. There is something in the blood that I must find. I feel it is very important that I find this thing quickly. If I do not, I feel something terrible will occur. It is of the utmost importance that I find this thing.’
    ‘Do you ever find it?’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I think I am about to, that soonit will become clear what it is and yet … I cannot see it. It is lost in the blood. I fear I have lost it myself, that I am responsible for the loss of this thing. In my dream I feel a dreadful sense of grief and as if I must die of guilt.’ Then he fell silent. He was still wringing his hands, and with each of these movements his chains rattled. The rattling was persistent and annoying, but I could not ask him to desist. He seemed to find the hand-wringing somehow comforting; certainly I rarely saw him stop it. As I made my notes, I wondered if it was not the case that these dreams of blood suggested a fear of life, of the conditions of living. I was thinking of the classical notion of the contamination of the soul by birth: the suggestion of Origen, for example, that everyone who enters the world is afflicted with a kind of contamination – because they reside in their mother’s womb, and because the source from which they take their body is the father’s seed, and thereby they are contaminated in respect of the father and the mother. I thought perhaps Herr S perceived life as a form of contamination, that this dream represented the striving of his confused soul for something higher than the life around him, and that this striving had severed him from ordinary human congress.
    *
    I have seen such self-loathing before; indeed such sentiments are often regarded as perfectly necessary and even devout by many of those who follow our major creeds. I have seen these beliefs become rigid in the asylums, drawing many into terrible visions of damnation. It begins with mere conventional piety, and descends into individual mayhem. Thereby believers come to despise the blood which flows through their bodies, and which sustains them. They come to despise it and to hope for a time when it will ceaseto move in their veins and they will be purged and resur-rected clean. For does it not say in the teachings of Ben Sira, ‘Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die’ – through birth we all die into life, torn from the side of our father God? The mother betrays us, drags us away from our spiritual parent, the invisible Father. So millions of humans have been persuaded that the questing soul must deny the mother and the earth; that the divine is not present among us but lies far beyond us. I wondered if Herr S had simply allowed his heart to be commanded by such teachings; and thus he feared this blood he imagined, believed his yearning for it was treacherous and must condemn him.
    *
    My good Professor Wilson, these are rather vague musings, and I hope you will forgive me. I have often been criticised for the diffusion and inconsequentiality of my thought, and I am quite aware that my opinions are not widely held. And indeed